Linux's New Fellow

Linux's New Fellow

February 8, 2012

While many people work on and with Linux, the Linux Foundation employs only a precious few as fellows. This past week, the number of good Linux fellows grew, and so too did the length of support available for the world's most deployed enterprise Linux distribution.

1. Greg Kroah-Hartman Joins the Linux Foundation

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a familiar name to most people on the Linux Planet who have followed the Linux Kernel Mailing List in recent years. Kroah-Hartman is the maintainer of the stable Linux kernels as well as the longterm kernel. Until last week, he was an employee of SUSE as well.

Kroah-Hartman has now taken a job as Linux Foundation fellow. The other big name Linux Foundation fellow is none other than Linux creator, Linus Torvalds.

"The embedded Linux market is growing rapidly, and Greg's deep level of experience here and history of collaboration with hardware manufacturers at the kernel level can accelerate the work that needs to be done in this area," Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation said. "It's a natural time for The Linux Foundation to sponsor his work, and we're very happy to be able to do it."

2. Red Hat Extends Support to 10 Years

Nothing lasts forever, but Red Hat is now aiming to make sure that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers are getting long life from their deployments.

This past week, Red Hat extended the normal support for RHEL from seven to 10 years. Previously, RHEL had only seven years of primary support with development and optional extended support for three additional years of security and bug fixes. With this change, RHEL 5 and 6 will get hardware and feature updates for longer than previous releases from Red Hat.

The change also means there will now be RHEL 5.9, 5.10 and 5.11 releases, extending the RHEL 5.x platform, which first debuted back in 2007.

3. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin Alpha 2 Released

Canonical doesn't yet offer 10 years of support for its enterprise releases know as Long Term Support (LTS). An Ubuntu LTS provides five years of support to enterprise users.

A new Ubuntu LTS is just around the corner, and this past week the second major milestone build was publicly released. Ubuntu 12.04 alpha 2 includes new support for the ARM architecture as well as an updated Linux 3.2.2 kernel.

The final release of Ubuntu 12.04 is currently set for April 26.

4. Ubuntu Kicks KDE to the Curb

The Ubuntu 12.04 release will also mark the end of the line for the KDE variant known as Kubuntu. Canonical will no longer fund the lead developer of the Kubuntu effort following the 12.04 release.

"Canonical wants to treat Kubuntu in the same way as the other community flavors such as Edubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu, and support the projects with infrastructure," Kubuntu developer, Jonathan Riddell wrote in a mailing list posting. "This is a rational business decision, Kubuntu has not been a business success after 7 years of trying, and it is unrealistic to expect it to continue to have financial resources put into it."

5. Firefox 10

While Linux distributions vary from project to project, one relatively common component of most is the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

This past week, Firefox 10 was released, debuting a new developer tool that helps users inspect web page content. The new Firefox release also supports the new CSS 3D-Transforms property. According to the official W3C draft specification, "CSS 3D Transforms extends CSS Transforms to allow elements rendered by CSS to be transformed in three-dimensional space."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist